What's New
Quality Connects Me
By Dave Tovissi
Vice President and General Manager
HARMAN Luxury Audio
November is Quality Month at HARMAN. Each year during World Quality Month, we reflect on our ongoing commitment to customer satisfaction by reinforcing our focus on the quality of our products, services and business operations. This year’s theme is “Quality Connects Me – Built-In Quality” and our activities will highlight the importance of reputation building, re-work elimination, and risk management. We celebrate this month by sharing the processes and the people that support our company’s steadfast commitment to quality.
One of the pioneers of quality improvement plans was Joseph Juran, the famed author and quality improvement expert. Born in Romania in 1904, Juran immigrated to the United States when he was eight. His family settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota. He also earned a law degree from Loyola University Chicago School of Law, but never practiced.
Juran worked at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, eventually moving into Bell Lab’s statistic-driven quality control department. His job involved collaborating with a team that quantified quality improvement innovations. This early work set the course of his life. In the 1930s, he rose to the position of Chief of Industrial Engineering.
His contributions came in many forms. He completely upended the traditional early 20th century approaches to making operations more efficient. One of his most notable contributions to quality was his publishing of the Juran Trilogy which addressed the planning, control, and improvement of quality in products. Below are the three pillars of his trilogy which we also adhere to at HARMAN:
• Quality Planning – Identify and develop a process that ensures quality at the very beginning of product development.
• Quality Control – Create a process that can operate under minimal inspection.
• Quality Improvement – Develop a process to review quality often and then optimize that process for continual improvement.
While we celebrate the teachings of Joseph Juran this month, we are reminded just how important teamwork and a highly engaged upper management group is to deliver Flawless Execution and Quality. No matter our roles or titles, we all have a responsibility to provide exceptional experiences and deliver high-quality products to our customers. As part of our mission to drive culture at HARMAN, we are committed to educating and empowering all our people to lead change in improving quality by complex problem solving, self-management, incorporating predictive tools, and more -- during World Quality Month and throughout the full year. We know that satisfied customers grow our business and that our focus on quality improves our results.
Later in this newsletter you will hear from Dale Seidlitz, our Global Quality Manager of Luxury Audio products and learn how he describes the meaning of quality to those who ask him.
